Journal

Not long ago, in order to access content you had to literally go get it: To purchase a book you had to go to a library, to see a movie you had to go to the neighborhood’s video store and to listen to the latest CD from your favorite band you had to go to the record store and cross your fingers to not find out it was sold out.

But time goes on, some habits are changing and with the advance of new technologies and the immediacy demanded by the user, nowadays there are no longer many of these rituals. While we are going to miss them, nowadays we can get any desired content at a tap/click away.

“Netflix and its almost 70 million subscribers have generated more than 1.7 Billion dollars, which represent a 20% increase for 2015. The Los Gatos, California Company published these results before offering its services in Spain, Italy and Portugal. Netflix’s objective for 2015 is to close the year with at least 5 million more subscribers worldwide.”

The interesting thing about this new (or not so new) range of possibilities is how startups and companies are able to generate different business models. Nowadays two sectors are notably taking advantage of streaming as a business model, videos and music. Some of these are:

1. Flash Sales:

Based on specific actions and important benefits. Its main strength is that they work at the time, so the user has to decide quickly or lose the opportunity to purchase the content at that price.

2. Subscription:

A methodology that has been on the market for some time and services such as Netflix make use of it, enabling the user to have unlimited access to content (as long as you keep the subscription).

3. Freemium:

While the service is presented in as free, the goal is to sell associated “Premium” services to advanced users. The key is to attract users who use the service for free but this means in most cases a strong initial investment.

4. E-learning:

No other time has produced a real revolution in this industry: We have gone from having courses that are acquired on the network and with each user marking his own pace to new formulas such as streaming classes, mini-courses by subject, platforms consultation with experts and even knowledge clips at very low price. All this combined with powerful virtual campuses that enable a more dynamic interaction with other students and teachers.

5. Cloud computing:

Here we can talk about all those companies that are engaged in the protection and data storage in the cloud. At present there are large corporations that included it in their portfolio such as Amazon, but certainly there are great opportunities in marketing cloud services for SMEs, possibly taking the form of broker advising companies who have this need.

6. Peer to peer:

Initiatives that fail to meet exchange and relationship requirements between users where supply and demand come together in specialized platforms.

7. Crowdfunding:

It’s about platforms that allow channeling the collective financing of projects that want to come to light. Widely used nowadays for recording albums or book publishing.

At ConsultR we love new platforms and even more new ideas. Do you have a streaming idea and you need help executing it? Contact us!